10 of the Best Indie Rock Film Soundtracks

We were interested (and not a little taken aback, to be honest) to see that Sigur Rós singer Jónsi was providing the soundtrack to new Cameron Crowe film We Bought a Zoo. Of course, he’s not exactly the first indie type to tackle soundtracking duties for a film — there have been a slew of such records over the last few years in particular, from Karen O’s exuberantly overblown score for Where the Wild Things Are to the all-star soundtracks that accompanied the Twilight films. And while those are both worthy albums in their own right (as, indeed, is Jónsi’s work on We Bought a Zoo), neither quite squeeze their way onto a list of our all-time favorite indie music-centric film soundtracks. What does make the cut? The answers await you after the jump, dear reader — and, as ever, let us know what your choices are.

Zeitgeist is one of those overused foreign words, but if such a thing exists, then the Trainspotting soundtrack did truly capture it for a fleeting moment in 1996. Mixing contemporary Brit guitar bands (Elastica, Blur, Pulp) with a smattering of electronic-based action (Underworld, Leftfield) and a couple of well-chosen classics (Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” and, of course, Iggy’s “Lust for Life”), this record was the musical backdrop to the mood of early-era Blairite Britain perfectly. And all in the context of a film about working-class heroin addiction. It was way more ironic than anyone could have realized at the time, eh?